ONE TOUGH QUESTION: ATTRIBUTION

CROSS-CHANNEL ATTRIBUTION: MYTH OR REALITY?

CUSTOMERS TRAVERSE CHANNELS LIKE BUMBLEBEES FLITTER THROUGH A FIELD; THIS MEANS THAT DETERMINING WHICH INTERACTIONS SHOULD GET

CREDIT FOR A PURCHASE IS A NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE FEAT.

S P O N S O R E D B Y

We’re all familiar with the famous John Wanamaker quote about knowing that half of his marketing dollars are going

to waste but not knowing which half. Despite an amazing array of analytics tools and marketing technologies, little has

changed, according to many industry watchers. The reason: As buyers search for the right item to purchase, they’re

wont to traverse channels like bumblebees flitter through a field. This non-linear behavior can make determining which

interactions should get credit for a purchase a nearly impossible feat.

Considering this, how can marketers make accurate cross-channel attribution a reality? We asked 12 marketing

experts for their insight. Here, their advice. –Ginger Conlon

TABLE OF CONTENTS

4 Jennifer Zeszut, CEO, Beckon

5 Scott Vaughan, CMO, Integrate Erich Wasserman, Cofounder, Chief Revenue Officer, MediaMath

9 Duncan McCall, CEO & cofounder, PlaceIQ Lori Gubin, Director of Product Marketing, Turn

11 CJ Arseneau, Vice President of Marketing, Telmetrics Kate O’Lough-lin, VP and GM, Media Business, Tapad

10 Tina Wisner, VP of Data Science and Analytics, Kre8 Media

7 Roy Shkedi, CEO, AlmondNet Group Ryan Hoffman, Chief Brand Strategist, Listrak

6 Emad Georgy, SVP Product Development and Global Head of Development, Experian Marketing Services

8 Robert Glazer, Founder and Managing Director, Ac-celeration Partners

12 Dave O’Flanagan, CEO, Boxever

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JENNIFER ZESZUTCEO, Beckon @jenniferland @BeckonInc

Naysaying industry watchers are partly right. Pin-point cross-channel attribution remains out of reach. But marketers can do broad attribution these days, and fairly decently. The key is to under-stand how particular models fall short, so you can get value without asking too much of them. (This is especially true if you’re outsourcing attribution.)

Econometric modeling, better known as mix modeling, takes years of data and correlates spikes in spend on various channels to spikes in revenue (if any). It’s a very coarse analysis, done quarterly or annually, and best suited for annual mix plan-ning. It’s been around forever, and remains a go-to approach for big consumer products companies that sell through indirect channels and market in traditional ways.

Digital attribution hit the scene about five years ago, and its various modes assign specific weights to the marketing touches that precede a sale. Dig-ital attribution can be illuminating for marketers who advertise and sell directly to known consum-ers; for example, e-commerce companies. It’s only a guess as to what’s actually driving sales, but at least it’s a disciplined, consistent guess.

The purest methodology for revenue attribution is also the most basic: test and control. If you want to know TV’s impact on sales, for example, run TV in one market but not in a similar market. Hold all other variables constant and compare sales.

No methodology is airtight. Each brings guess-work, caveats and tradeoffs. But despite the drawbacks, tying marketing activities to business outcomes is here to stay, and worth the effort.

SCOTT VAUGHANCMO, Integrate@ScottAVaughan @integrate

With 11 to 17 prospect interactions required to convert a new customer, according to new research from Sirius Decisions, we have a new “Wanamaker-like” riddle: which one of the interactions can we attribute to creating a new customer or specific marketing outcome? Attribution, when it works, helps brands track their marketing and media efforts more accu-rately and show how they impact the overall business.

This cross-channel thing is where it gets complicated. It’s not easy, nor perfect, but it’s possible today. It requires an investment in technology, standardized processes, big data with sophistical models, and most of all talent: leadership talent with the guts and conviction to make the long-term investment for incremental progress over time; and data science tal-ent to apply complex data models who also understand how to correlate offline and online data and long-term brand investments with transactional data.

In my view, the march is on for cross-channel attribution and, while not all will master it, more marketing organizations are embracing the challenge because of the accountability expected by company officers and investors. It’s a Holy Grail quest. The one question I still don’t have the answer to is: Is it worth it? We can now measure cross-channel attribution, fantastic. Did the time, talent, and resources it took to develop and implement attribution models take away from other marketing (e.g., customer experience) or even company in-vestment (e.g., new products)? Only time will tell.

ERICH WASSERMANCofounder, Chief Revenue Officer, MediaMath@erichwasserman @MediaMath

If posed today, rather than focus on one half of the marketing bud-get, Wanamaker might ask a different question: How is the entire budget spent and how are today’s marketers adjusting to consum-ers’ changing behaviors? Not only are consumer segments con-nected and dynamic platforms emerging, but also new geographies and shorter time horizons are influencing marketing. The power of digital advertising means that marketers must focus on the entire budget and adjust their spend in real time. Marketers should view their budget not in silos of social, mobile, video, and print, but as goal-oriented for the consumer. That means every dollar counts.

EMAD GEORGYSVP Product Development and Global Head of Development, Experian Marketing Services@ExperianMkt

According to a new study we released as part of our 2015 Digi-tal Marketer report, 89% of marketers around the world struggle with attribution. While attribution remains a common challenge for marketers, they absolutely have the ability to change that. To get started, marketers need three things:

1. The right technology. Frequently, marketers have disparate an-alytics tools that force them to act like CTOs. They’re held respon-sible for determining which tools integrate effectively to provide accurate analytics. This situation makes cross-channel attribution seem impossible. Marketers need access to integrated platforms that provide a direct, cross-channel view of attribution performance. The right technology allows marketers to focus on what they do best instead of worrying about how all the disparate technologies, contractors, and vendor relationships will come together to provide a cohesive view of the customer.

2. Organizational courage. Siloed-by-channel marketing teams of-ten use metrics to confirm existing biases about the performance of their channel. But true cross-channel attribution re-poses questions that many in marketing organizations had already thought were an-swered. The data can bring the channel teams together to challenge each other, and to talk through the “whys” behind performance. But the organization needs to have the courage to look at the custom-er journey across channels and not be restricted by channel; to use channels as a strength and a specialization, not a constraint.

3. A clear path. Marketers need to determine how they will take actions and make decisions based on cross-channel attribution data: “What will we do if we learn that a mobile SMS interaction per-formed better on an unexpected day, with a surprising segment of customers, or at an expected location? Does our marketing platform and technology support insights that inspire action?” By answering these questions, marketers truly have the ability to minimize uncer-tainty and turn cross-channel attribution into a reality.

RYAN HOFMANN Chief Brand Strategist, Listrak @listrak

Marketers have long been trying to measure the ROI of digital media spend. Better said, trying to justify how and where they have spent their money. The way most have been trying to measure mar-keting dollars, however, has been fundamentally flawed.

Online marketing and Web analytics promised a “closed loop” of justification: spend money on dig-ital media, attach source-tracking parameters to URLs, and capture tracking parameters when a cus-tomer converts. Voila! I now know exactly what drove a customer to make a purchase and can justify every dollar spent. Right? Not exactly.

The biggest problem with this last-click attribution scenario is that it grossly oversimplifies the com-plexities of human behavior that lead consumers to purchase, often discounts the myriad channels involved, and most likely ignores offline transactions. In today’s omnichannel world the best method for measuring the effectiveness of marketing spend is in another time-tested technique: incremental revenue analysis. Direct mail marketers have successfully used this approach for decades to gauge how much incremental revenue truly came from sending an expensive direct mail piece, and the same approach should be used for digital direct channels such as display ads, email, push notifications, and SMS alerts.

Marketers shouldn’t care what the last referring channel was before conversion; that revenue may have come regardless of that channel touch. What they should care about is that a marketing impression—whether in the inbox, on a smartphone lock screen, or on the Web—was successful in driving incremental customers to convert in-store or online.

ROY SHKEDI CEO, AlmondNet Group

It’s amazing that almost two centuries later, we’re still referencing John Wanamaker’s quote. It goes to show that despite our technological progress, the core challenges of advertising remain: How do we accu-rately attribute advertising spend?

With cross-device campaigns becoming more prevalent, marketers continue to face many challenges when it comes to attribution. While cross-device challenges are many, here are examples of a few major ones:

1. Residential IP addresses are dynamic, making it a challenge to vendors that rely on IP addresses.2. Log-in data, while valuable, has its own drawbacks. Namely, on shared devices a large percentage of

users do not log out of tools such as Facebook or Chrome. So, let’s say that a mom doesn’t log out of Facebook on a PC shared by several household members. Any activity that occurs on the PC by her kids will paint an inaccurate picture.

3. A typical mobile device—whether a smartphone, tablet, or laptop—visits multiple locations, which is an advantage and a chal-lenge considering and depending on the advertiser’s goals.

The reality is that all cross-device offerings, whether they’re based on deterministic or probabilistic models, are prone to uncer-tainties that get in the way of making clear and accurate links between media budgets and consumers’ behavior in general and across their different screens in particular.

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Measuring the activity between online impressions, offline actions, and ultimate purchase behavior is one of the biggest challenges today’s marketers face. At Telmetrics, we believe that phone calls are a valuable metric to close the online-offline attribution gap.

Our call tracking and analytics solutions are powered by 360° CallTelligence, which delivers the attribution insights you need to prove and optimize the value of your digital programs.

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ROBERT GLAZERFounder and Managing Director, Acceleration Partners @robert_glazer

Wasted ad spend prevents true innovation from taking place and makes it hard for marketers to make informed decisions. As marketers have increasingly come under pressure to demonstrate value, attribution modeling has become top of mind. Digital marketers used to attribute sales to the first or last click before purchase, but the pro-liferation of online channels has made this methodolo-gy obsolete. Shoppers may see a number of ads before making a purchase and retailers struggle to give credit to each channel—search, display, or affiliate—based on the role it plays in the purchase process. What’s more, inac-curate systems can reward the wrong channels, partners, or internal departments, and, ultimately, damage the bot-tom line.

More and more marketers are building internal sys-tems of attribution to better assign proper credit and resources to the channels that work. They’re leveraging complex models such as multi-touch, time-decay, and position-based attribution to more efficiently allocate their marketing spend. For example, online home store Wayfair made its internal affiliate attribution rules public, creating more transparency and ensuring that affiliates understand which behaviors the e-tailer values. Wayfair pays the last affiliate that a visitor clicks on before adding something to the cart, rather than the standard approach of paying a commission to the last affiliate a consumer clicks on before making a purchase.

By establishing an internal attribution model, market-ers have the data they need to allocate their resources ef-fectively. Every point across the marketing funnel matters, and proper attribution will result in less ad spend wasted and ensure your company achieves the results it deserves.

DUNCAN MCCALL CEO and cofounder, PlaceIQ @dunkmac @PlaceIQ

The most important element of cross-channel attribution is having a view of consumers as they cross between the digital and physical worlds. When most marketers think of cross-channel, they tend to limit themselves to just mobile and display. There are of course multitudes of touchpoints for consumers to interact with brands, each operating in its own corner of the marketing ecosystem, under its own set of rules, each using its own set of measurements—and few of which fluidly bridge among the silos between them.

Mobile and location data is a factor that provides a connective layer between all of them—providing imminently familiar and very necessary context as consumers move between time, space, and devices. Mobile devices themselves provide a network of sensors for consumer behavior that is ubiquitous. As a result, mobile can be used as the focal point of a cross-channel strategy that allows brands and agencies to see the real-world impact that each marketing element is having on in-store foot traffic.

A retailer, for example, can use mobile to understand how a significant TV ad spend affects in-store foot traffic using mobile. Taking it one step forward, this retailer can also understand and measure how that TV

ad spend, coupled with a targeted mobile ad campaign boosts in-store visitation. Now couple this with analyzing other surrounding marketing program execution—direct mail, display, email, website visits—on real-world behaviors and visitation and the promise of this approach becomes clear: The insights gleaned from mobile in this capacity give companies the ability to successfully align disparate marketing channels for their endgame of driving buyers to visit their locations. Because mobile works across all marketing channels, it’s also best suited to provide a reliable and effective attribution mechanism. The ability to measure real-world visitation is the payoff.

LORI GUBIN Director of Product Marketing, Turn @TurnPlatform

Cross-device attribution is not only possible, but at a time when consumers are using three or more devices per day, it’s imperative to understand which events led to conversion along the consumer’s entire journey—not just what resulted in the final click.

Ideally, your attribution methodology will address multiple touches by linking common events for an audi-ence on a single device and across their devices, including interactions from multiple campaigns.

To accomplish this and inform future campaigns, you’ll want to use both real-time optimization and report-ing insights. Using an adaptive model based on statistical analysis provides an unbiased, data-driven approach that yields optimal results. The model will assign fractional credit (i.e., weights) to all of the advertiser touch-points (e.g., impressions/clicks) that consumers encountered along their conversion path. The fractions will then be used to optimize campaign bids and allocate budgets in real time.

This multi-touch attribution methodology also provides insights about your campaign’s effectiveness over time, even if one cam-paign didn’t directly result in conversion.

When selecting an attribution method, you’ll want to consider what media can be tracked; what level of granularity of attribution is supported, e.g. impressions, clicks, actions, other data events; and the frequency that the information will be made available.

Knowing what happened just before a final click is not enough. When you choose a model that provides insights into the entire cus-tomer journey, you can make informed decisions and achieve—and even exceed—your marketing goals.

TINA WISNERVP of Data Science and Analytics, Kre8 Media@TinaWisner @ Kre8Media

Breaking down the walls of media silo can bring cross-channel attribution to reality.

The adoption rate of cross-channel attri-bution remains low despite the many so-phisticated tools and analytics approaches available today. Only two out of eight mar-keters today measure multiple channels and campaigns simultaneously. The rest is spread between single-channel measure-ment and selective or limited cross-chan-nel measurement.

The biggest roadblock to full propagation of the cross-channel methodology across the business enterprise remains the chal-lenge of proving out the impact of a new approach against the existing—especially when the latter shows each media channel individually achieving the efficiency goal under a controlled level of spend. Looking at media channels in silo will limit market-ers’ success. Break that media silo for op-portunities to reveal themselves.

KATE O’LOUGHLIN VP and GM, Media Business, Tapad @tapad

It’s true that cross-channel attribution has been challenging, but it is evolving rapidly. Once, we were totally blind to the relationship between ads shown on one device and actions taken on an-other. Now, we can measure the correlation seamlessly across screens and even offline.

We’ve moved to a place where assessing the exact value of a single advertising tactic such as “spend on mobile” is, in all likelihood, ill-advised. Mobile, desktop, or any other channel should be considered as part of a whole. Viewed in a silo, mobile ads might appear to have little impact on a campaign—making it easy to discount or dismiss their importance. To truly understand the consumer’s path to purchase, we need to see the impact of every ad in every channel of a unified campaign.

A great example of progress is demonstrated by data and analytics companies that partner with cross-screen technologists. Advertisers who use those technologies can now understand how their online campaigns are driving offline conversions and in-store visits.

One of the biggest remaining hurdles is for technologies to open themselves for measurement. Vendors working together as an industry will be what makes full attribution possible. Different com-panies will provide varying levels of expertise to the market and regulatory organizations like DAA and IAB will help set standards as we work together to bring the most value to advertisers.

CJ ARSENEAU Vice President of Marketing, Telmetrics @telmetrics

Today’s marketers are tasked with not just generating leads, but also proving the value of those leads across an array of channels (e.g., mobile, digital, email, video, social). However, capturing the accurate source of a lead can be elusive, as there are multiple consumer touchpoints that drive purchases, with different types of metrics being applied at each stage. To get a clear attribution picture for lead generation across platforms, marketers need reliable universal metrics—ones that can be measured regardless of the channel or platform.

Calls are one universal metric that can play a key role for marketers looking to accurately attri-bute lead sources, as well as maximize purchase indicators and conversions. Tying call tracking numbers to specific ad distribution channels, campaigns, and keywords enables marketers to ac-curately trace the source of a lead, determine whether a call happened, and learn other key infor-mation such as call durations, call times, and caller demographics. All of this data helps reveal the true value of the lead. Marketers can learn a great deal about their leads through universal metrics and then use that data to refine ad programs for better results.

Accurate cross-channel attribution is critical to understanding lead quality and which marketing programs are performing. Marketers who integrate universal metrics such as calls into their pro-grams—including proper results tracking—will be well-positioned to improve not only the accuracy

of their cross-channel attribution strategies but overall lead quality, as well.

DAVE O’FLANAGANCEO, Boxever @daveof @Boxever

The journey from single-source attribution to omnichannel attribution can be achieved, but not in one giant leap. Realistically, mar-keters must take a series of small, strategic steps to get smarter and gain clarity as they implement, test, and learn. As with all mar-keting strategy, successful cross-channel at-tribution requires progressing through levels of maturity.

To start, marketers must eliminate siloed world views, and integrate data across chan-nels. This integration needs to include both online and offline channels, everything from online ads to email to call center interactions to in-store service. While the initial integration might be met with some resistance, the abil-ity to capture and analyze the performance of all marketing efforts in one view ultimate-ly will provide the organization with a more complete view of where the best conversions come from, where the highest value custom-ers engage, and what products or offers are the most profitable.

Marketers must also think beyond simply tracking brand interactions and leverage attri-bution data to understand the persona or per-sonas of each customer. Sometimes the “who” is more important than the “how,” or marketing dollars can be wasted targeting the right per-son, but at the wrong time or location—like fo-cusing a retargeted beer advertisement on an expecting mother who may love beer, but isn’t in the market for it right now.